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Ticket brokering is a booming business on the ´net

02/01/2004

Slide4less sells and trades lift ticket vouchers and coupons on the net. The internet has taken "ticket brokering" from pro football tickets, to airline miles, and now ski lift ticket vocuhers......

(PRWEB) January 2 2004--Some people feel strongly that reselling tickets (or “scalping”) is a serious crime that should be punished. After all, many jurisdictions around the country have laws preventing people from reselling passes to popular sporting events, airline miles, and ski lift tickets.

We at Slide4less believe that the people who support these laws should take a good look at how ticket brokering (or trading) is being cleanly conducted on the Internet and the invaluable advertising and exposure that is generated for events, in this case the ski resorts themselves, the supposed “victims” of scalping.

Via the Internet, scalping really is becoming a win-win situation for both skiers and resort management. After all, advertising brings skiers/boarders and those folks keep the resorts in business. We think that it the short run, this internet activity could hurt ski resorts' bottom line because it tends to push competition, and drive the price down. However, we also believe this activity is good because it creates exposure for the resorts, and this helps increase the numbers of people that get out on the slopes in a given year.

Slide4less.com is in the business of helping to expand participation in "Extreme Sports" and "Alternative Sports" and related events. One of the activities that Slide4less.com feels has been successful in accomplishing this basic company goal is helping to fuel on-line trading of ski lift ticket vocuhers. Collecting discounted ski ticket vouchers and reselling them, thereby promoting the best ski deals currently available around the country increases visibility. This naturally generates a tremendous amount of excitement and exposure for the resorts on the eve of the season and beyond.

Ticket brokering and trading is a real booming business on the Internet, especially through popular auction sites like eBay and Yahoo. Reaction from skiers and snowboarders is clearly positive, but from the resort owners? Well, that is decidedly mixed.

The Denver Post and Durango Herald of Colorado recently reported the angst that some resort managers feel over the selling and trading of lift tickets and vouchers on the Internet. The Durango Herald reported in a recent article (http://durangoherald.com/asp-bin/article_generation.asp?article_type=out&article_path=/outdoors/out031130_1.htm) that a bulk of the 17,000 free lift tickets handed out by Crested Butte at the first Denver Nuggets game in November are now selling for $45 each on eBay.

"Obviously that's not in the spirit of any of these promotions," said Crested Butte spokeswoman Gina Kroft as reported in the Herald. “Particularly galling for resort operators is watching vacationing skiers pay $40 for a lift ticket and a coupon for four more discounted lift tickets that would have cost far more at the ticket window,” the article continued.

“Oh, that just drives John nuts,” Kroft said of Crested Butte CEO John Norton. “But it's hard to avoid, especially when you distribute as many as we did.”

However, the article also noted that Durango Mountain Resort officials don't have many problems with passes being sold or traded on the Internet.

“It's inevitable that one or two would wind up there,” Matt Skinner, the resort´s communications director told the Durango Herald. “If it became more of a problem we would have to re-examine more of our promotions.”
Obviously, not all resorts are “hip” to what could really benefit them in the long run. Who wouldn´t want free advertising, after all? But rather than looking at where we are, let us first look at how we got here.

“We had started a website called Slide4less and we approached some ski show/expo promoters and made a couple of deals to sell some tickets for the shows,” said Slide4less co-owner Darren Romar. “But every ski deal we made at that time pretty much sucked. In one deal, we bought $14,000 worth of show tickets for resale, only to have an apparently desperate promoter undercut the price, making it impossible for us to resell the tickets as agreed. We practically had to eat the $14,000. Now I now why they come up with all these crazy regulations in other industries I'm more accustomed to.”

“That wasn´t the only deal like that,” Romar added. “After that one in particular, though, we decided to have a bunch of friends go to a show and get free lift tickets and then we had a great idea! We had so many tickets that trying to pawn a few at the resort was too much of a hassle, so we started selling them on eBay.”
Little could Romar have known, however, that reselling ticket vouchers on the Internet would become such an incredibly thriving business practiced by hundreds of sellers and thousands of buyers around the world every day.

“At first, selling them on eBay was tough going,” he explained. “People didn´t know where to look for lift tickets on eBay so we had to create a market. We wrote a book called the ´Ski Bum´s Guide.´ We printed 500 copies and sold them on eBay. We also passed some out to people selling tickets in the resort parking lots. The guide told them how we sold tickets on eBay. We figured that selling tickets like that wasn´t really illegal, regardless of what the vouchers or coupons said. After all, pro football tickets are scalped in the classified section of the newspaper every day, and pro footabll ticket scalping is 'more illegal' than selling lift tickets,” Steve Steinberg said.

Romar and his partner, Steve Steinberg, have learned a lot in a short time from their experiences, and despite attempts to quash ticket brokering in some areas, trading and reselling ski lift tickets on the Internet is as robust as ever, thanks in large part to the work of Slide4less.

“Just think about it – now we have that book out there and tons of people are listing on eBay and really starting to catch on. It´s working! People trade the tickets and it exposes the resort to a different set of patrons than they normally advertise to, not to mention the family and friends those people will bring with them up to the hill. It also encourages scalpers to get out of the parking lot and start generating some free advertising for the resorts on the Internet.” said Steinberg.

Slide4less is currently looking for feedback from skiers, snowboarders, resort personnel and managers on what they think about ticket brokering on the Internet. Those with an opinion on the subject should write to darren@slide4less.com and also pay a visit to the website at slide4less.com for more information.

Either way you look at it, many new skiers and snowboarders are getting up on the hill to enjoy the snowy summits and isn´t that what we are all in this for – having some fun in the snow?